Sarah Dobrowolski, MD, PhD, FRCPC

Research

I am clinician, scholar, and educator with a clinical focus on amputation and stroke rehabilitation.

From an academic and education perspective, my work seeks to explore how empathy is embodied and enacted in both clinical and health professions education contexts. Currently, I am primarily exploring how the concept of healthism (Crawford, 1980) affects empathic relations in these settings. Briefly, healthism is a type of bias that encourages viewing health narrowly as a personal and moral responsibility, thus diverting attention away from its social and environmental antecedents, and limiting how we live and experience our lives more broadly. Such is particularly salient for consideration in the rehabilitation context given that healthism encourages preference for normatively healthy – and able – bodies. In this way, healthism is deeply related to ableism, which is discrimination against those who experience disability.

All this is to say, how can we promote health in and through rehabilitation contexts in more empathic ways, beyond the logics of healthism and ableism? How can rehabilitation practitioners better see into and act upon the social and structural factors that affect our patients' health? How can rehabilitation settings be places of resistance and renewal, toward a gentler and more generative world, for all? In sum, how do we move from a culture of healthism to one of wholeism?

These are the kinds of questions that drive my work and scholarship, which I explore primarily through a critical qualitative research paradigm using participatory, narrative, and arts-based research methods. I invite prospective graduate students who are similarly interested in these questions to inquire about ongoing and potential research opportunities in the areas of critical health promotion, rehabilitation, and health professions education.